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Customized Implementation of European Union Food Safety Policy pp 49–81Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Researching Customization: The Data, the Methods, and the Cases

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Part of the book series: International Series on Public Policy ((ISPP))

Abstract

This chapter introduces the data, methods and cases that form the basis of the empirical study. The research presented here was originally a comparative research project that provided advice to the Swiss federal government about ensuring legal equivalence with community law. In order to explore the patterns, causes and consequences of customization, I employ a nested comparative case study design using innovative set-theoretic methodologies. Veterinary drug policies regulate important aspects of food safety in the EU single market. I compare their customization in four older member states—Austria, France, Germany and the United Kingdom—and the differentially integrated non-member, Switzerland. These countries are comparable in their regulatory contexts, but each of them displays distinct patterns of differentiated implementation.

This chapter draws in parts from Thomann, E. 2015. Customizing Europe: Transposition as bottom-up implementation. Journal of European Public Policy 22(10): 1368–1387, and Sager, F., Thomann, E., Zollinger, C. and C. Mavrot. 2014. Confronting theories of European integration: A comparative congruence analysis of veterinary drugs regulations in five countries. Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis: Research and Practice 16(5): 457–474. Reprinted with permission by Taylor & Francis Ltd., http://www.informaworld.com.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/PJTOCG

  2. 2.

    Source: http://ec.europa.eu/food/audits-analysis/audit_reports/index.cfm [Retrieved: 12.5.2017].

  3. 3.

    The analyses in Chaps. 4 and 6 were conducted at different moments in time. The earlier analysis in Chap. 4 was based on the fs/QCA 2.5 software (Ragin and Davey 2014). The newer analysis in Chap. 6 used the R packages QCA and SetMethods; (Dusa 2018; Medzihorsky et al. 2017). The latter software offers more functionality than the former. For example, I did not perform super-/subset analysis for Chap. 4 and hence did not account for necessary “OR”-combinations of conditions. Similarly, measures for RoN were not yet available, and the presentation of truth tables and counterfactual arguments differ in form, but not content, for the two chapters (see online appendix). The most important difference lies in the presentation of model ambiguities (Baumgartner and Thiem 2015) and the presence of replication codes, which were not available for the analysis in Chap. 4. Overall, however, both software solutions provided the tools necessary to perform the analytic steps described in this chapter.

  4. 4.

    My colleague, Céline Mavrot, collected the data on the French case.

  5. 5.

    My colleague, Christine Zollinger, collected the data on the Swiss case.

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    Eva Thomann

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Thomann, E. (2019). Researching Customization: The Data, the Methods, and the Cases. In: Customized Implementation of European Union Food Safety Policy. International Series on Public Policy . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92684-1_3

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